Cristina Odone

Messianic Trees · **Joined:** Fri Mar 18, 2011 10:50 pm **Posts:** 2900

Royal Mail's lazy, slow-moving postmen have enjoyed a monopoly long enough. Time to bring on TNT!

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I blame Postman Pat: kind and cuddly, animal-loving and child-friendly. It gave everyone the impression that posties were the best public servants, a beloved feature of the neighbourhood.

Yeah, right. Viz magazine's Postman Plod is nearer the mark. Postmen (postwomen are no better) have got away with sloppy delivery and lazy attitudes for years now. Thank goodness that, as of today, TNT Post UK is challenging Royal Mail by unveiling its first major UK trial of delivering post in the west London area.

Until today, the Royal Mail posties have got away with the kind of work ethic that would get them fired within minutes in the private sector. UK residents have to wait until midday for their post; post office hours are so unfriendly that only the unemployed can pick up a delivery before it is sent back to sender. Walk down a street in west London as I do daily, and you'll catch sight of the postman pushing his red trolley lackadaisically with one hand, while he is chitchatting away on his mobile, and even (in the case of one postwoman) enjoying a leisurely cigarette. Sometimes they stop off to deliver a "sorry you were out" card, often while you're still in.

Service? Think again. Work ethic? Come on! the Communication Workers' Union had a fit because Royal Mail dared ask postmen to walk four miles per hour in order to deliver to the 400-500 addressees they are supposed to reach on their daily, three-and-a-half hours' walk. Four miles per hour? That's far too much effort for union workers to waste on delivering the long-awaited gift, or the make-or-break job application. Three and a half hours? Ooh, that sounds like torture.

This is a mollycoddled profession, where worries about – yes, you've guessed it – "health and safety" had the former Royal Mail chief executive phase out cycling for his postmen: they risked hurting themselves by delivering our post on time.

Royal Mail Chat (you have to register to log in) shows how nervous posties are about the prospect of privatisation. Royal Mail has clearly enjoyed their monopoly of our postal system, and are reluctant to give way to the competition; but I don't see how anything else will work. Bring on TNT, I say!

Tubby Isaacs · **Posted:** Mon Apr 16, 2012 8:25 pm

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post office hours are so unfriendly that only the unemployed can pick up a delivery before it is sent back to sender.

http://www.royalmail.com/delivery/inbou ... redelivery

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Book redelivery online
Redeliver to your own address or another
Convenient and free of charge
Collect from your local Post Office®

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We hold items for 18 calendar days before returning them to their sender

mojojojo · **Joined:** Fri Mar 19, 2010 1:33 pm **Posts:** 4436

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This is a mollycoddled profession

Says a fucking journalist.

Tubby Isaacs · **Posted:** Mon Apr 16, 2012 8:28 pm

The Mail on TNT:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... worse.html

Althea · **Posted:** Mon Apr 16, 2012 8:34 pm

Only point I'd agree with her on is post now coming later. It can affect businesses quite a bit as they can't deal with the post until the afternoon.

But for most of us? Not much of a problem.

Malcolm Armsteen · **Posted:** Mon Apr 16, 2012 8:47 pm

mojojojo wrote:

Quote:

This is a mollycoddled profession

Says a fucking journalist.

The point.

ezinra · **Posted:** Mon Apr 16, 2012 8:55 pm

I find it really difficult to walk at four miles an hour. Wee legs.

I occasionally deliver leaflets and the whole business of opening a garden gate, walking up a path, stooping to fit the leaflet through the letterbox, turning, and shutting the gate behind me takes time. I doubt I cover two miles in an hour in the kind of district where I imagine Odone resides. And I never need to knock at the door or wait for somebody to sign for an item.

Not everyone can receive their mail before 8 in the morning. Royal Mail works with small businesses to make sure they get their delivery at the beginning of the working day. That seems reasonable to me. The rest of us — including freelance hacks like Odone — just have to be patient. Working from home has other advantages.

The neo-liberal fetish for productivity is ugly. I'm happy when my postman stops to say hello. My neighbour is housebound; she does too. I'm happy to pay 60p for a stamp if it means the postman calls.

Working in the media isn't the most productive job. It's not really meant to be: keeping contacts is a skill in itself. I'd agree that there is a long hours culture, but that's true of much of the public sector too (NHS, teaching, social services). Journalists are very likely to step out for a cigarette during working hours; they make as many personal calls as anyone else; and they regularly don't answer their phones even though they're not really busy.

Tubby Isaacs · **Posted:** Mon Apr 16, 2012 9:15 pm

Quote:

the Communication Workers' Union had a fit because Royal Mail dared ask postmen to walk four miles per hour in order to deliver to the 400-500 addressees they are supposed to reach on their daily, three-and-a-half hours' walk.

So they don't deliver any post? And they don't have a trolley with them?

Bit more on the bikes health and safety thing

http://www.shponline.co.uk/commentcommu ... ction-plan

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“This isn't leisure cycling, it's cycling for work, and considerations are very different when people cycle as part of their job. Postal workers can't pick and choose where they go on their cycle, like leisure cyclists or people commuting, and changes in road and traffic conditions have made cycles no longer suitable on many routes. For every postman and woman that loves their cycle, there's one that hates them.”

Royal Mail has revealed that the decision to reduce the number of cycles was made in response to the changing profile of mail, which is increasingly made up of bulky parcels from Internet shopping, and to improve health and safety. Over the past 15 years, 13 cycle delivery postmen and women have been killed at work and thousands more injured, as the result of road-traffic accidents.

That didn't take very long to find.

Bones McCoy · **Joined:** Mon Aug 16, 2010 9:08 am **Posts:** 7419

My experience with TNT commercial deliveries has been poor.
The goods have always arrived, but several high-value deliveries have been followed by armed robberies same evening.

satnav · **Posted:** Mon Apr 16, 2012 11:40 pm

From the looks of it Odone sat around all weekend hoping a big story would break so she could pontificate on it but when no suitable story turned up she just knocked out a column on the first thing that came into her head.

I used to have quite a lot of dealings with private delivery companies when I worked as an exam marker the only company anywhere near satisfactory was Parcel Force because they were the only company that would drop parcels off at the local post office if I wasn't in. Most other companies like UPS and City Link all have collection centres that are over 10 miles away so you miss a delivery it's usually a twenty mile round trip wasting a hour of my time and about £5 in petrol.

Tubby Isaacs · **Posted:** Mon Apr 16, 2012 11:53 pm

She's had her arse kicked.

Tom_UK · **Joined:** Tue Oct 27, 2009 3:14 pm **Posts:** 3168

I can't say it surprises me to find Cristina Odone (once again, what the hell is that accent?) talking bollocks. I recall a programme that was on the television last year (possibly Panorama) which set out to test that Royal Mail's assertion that its posties should be able to do their rounds within a set time. The managers had based everything on theoretical scenarios (computer simulations I think) based on someone being able to walk from A to B at a certain speed, and did not account for the postman pushing the trolley or the fact that he/she would have to walk up and down drives and paths, knock on doors for parcels and recorded deliveries, the fact that members of the public might try to engage them in conversation etc. The programme makers found that the posties were pretty much being asked to perform the impossible.

Fflaps · **Posted:** Tue Apr 17, 2012 9:47 am

My brother used to work as a postman doing a rural round. Needless to say a lot of his shift was spent walking up driveways and driving from one farm to the next. No one complained their post was late or that it was a crappy service.

Watchman · **Posted:** Tue Apr 17, 2012 8:19 pm

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Come on! the Communication Workers' Union had a fit because Royal Mail dared ask postmen to walk four miles per hour in order to deliver to the 400-500 addressees they are supposed to reach on their daily, three-and-a-half hours' walk. Four miles per hour?

I'm a regular walker, and we work on 3 miles per hour average cross country; to get upto 4 miles an hour I'd need to be going in a straight line, flat surface and no backpack; not carrying a sack of letters going up and down drives etc.

If she thinks TNT will be delivering her post on a velvet cushion when she wants it delivered...........laff, I thought me legs would never dry!

spoonman · **Joined:** Tue May 11, 2010 2:27 pm **Posts:** 922

I remember when I was staying in Australia for a short time the nearest shop other than a small petrol station was about 5km or 3 miles away and I'd often take around 50 minutes to an hour to do that.

Cristina Odone

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